Category: Development blog

Things are slow here because so are we, we are having some vacation and preparation for Gamescom in cologne next month! *wiie* Also, while we’re not getting any income from Penny’s Farm we also have to do some other jobs to keep us afloat which slows down the work even more. We hope you understand this and will support us through it. Hopefully things will be moving along after Gamescom if we find someone to partner up with. We will still update whenever we have something to say, or just to let you know what’s going on!

We also started a Ko-fi page so that those who wish can support us by buying us a cup of coffee, we all know developers can’t live without it right? 😉 Penny keeps the moonshine to herself so we will have to make do. That’s it for now, take care and we will write soon again!

We have decided to work on a new menu where the players join in whilst the characters are walking on a road on their way to their new job. (WIP image)

New menu in progressOld menu

Once all the players have selected their characters they arrive at the farm and accepts the job. We think this is a better way to introduce the players to the setting so that there won’t be any misunderstandings. We love diversity and want the players to be able to get a good representation of people. Since the setting is now early 1900’s (was late 1800’s) we don’t want to risk that anyone to confuse the workers for slaves as this was brought to our attention by some players. We even got a unisex bathroom so that all the farmers can enjoy taking a dump together like civilised people!

The reason we chose a setting so far back in time is that we did not want any technological things involved. We wanted an old-school organic farm where everything is done like the farmers did long ago. Just because that’s the way we liked it I guess! Besides, the hard work everyone needs to put in together would not make sense if you had a milking machine that could milk 100 cows in a minute. We’d rather see you get that elbow grease and get down and dirty while panicking because you have to go to the outhouse. If some things are tweaked a little more we believe that this will be perfect. 🙂 We have discussed the story behind it and what would work for us. We needed Penny to be firm and strict because that is how the players get pressured. She is really a nice person though! 😉 More updates will come as we will keep on working with updating a few things before we start to create the new content.

On a completely different note we have signed up for PLAY festival that is being held in November 1-5 in Hamburg. It is a creative gaming festival created by Creative_gaming. Now we just have to wait and see if we get nominated. We are also getting ready to apply for Gamescom which takes place in Cologne 22-26 August. Keep your fingers crossed and we will see you soon! Also thank you for taking your time to read our little farm-blog! Until next time.

We know that we have been really bad at showing exactly what it is that we do. We are working on a new trailer and some fixes to be able to show what the game is about much better. For now we decided to show what the game play looked like when we were testing the game out before GGC (Gotland Game Conference) and SGA (Swedish Game Awards).

Three of us is playing and have just met the days quota of crops which is shown up in the left corner. The players have to communicate to get the tasks done in time, or you could just run a round and kick each other which is fun but not really helping the team out. At the end of the day the merchant arrives and the players gets to find out how much money they made after the required crops of the day. The Money needs to be enough for the rent as well. If not Penny will take the amount from your saved money (if you have any). If you made enough money so that you have some left, you can choose to save or buy something from the merchant. You can buy new tools or new crops to help you meet the requirements the following days. Non of the special events that can happen is shown in this short preview however. For example one day Penny decide to rent some of the farm out to a rail-road company and the players get a big surprise when the day starts. And some days the rabbits are extra energetic and the players will have to keep defending the crops from getting eating. Another thing not showing here is the timer which is showing a count down of the time left of the day.

We will update with our new trailer soon so keep an eye out. Thanks for reading, see you around!

We hope that you had a long and great weekend, we sure did! Penny’s Farm got the “Gamers choice award” at Swedish game awards! That means that we got most votes from the people playing our game two contests in a row and we are so happy about it!! Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who voted!

What happens now?
Well, we just needed a breather and then we will continue to develop the game here on Gotland . Since we have no more school we will be looking for an office and a new home for some team members needing to leave the student apartments. That may cause some issues but not too much we hope. And development -wise we will expand the game and create some new design based on feedback we got from both judges and other players. For example we will create more tasks that requires two or more peoples co-operation because as is now the players do all the tasks alone even though the dividing of tasks means cooperating. And then create more events that will make the days you have to survive more fun and more differed from one another. For the show floor we only had five different days you had to survive since we did not expect people to play for long. But they did and even came back to play. For a finished game we would want people to be able to play for many more days and see how long they can last before it becomes nearly impossible.

Since we need to eat and such we need to have some sort of income to be able to continue the creation of this game. So our first step is to start marketing and try to get some cash so that we can work! The team will discuss how we want to approach this. Until then keep an eye out for updates. 🙂

Yesterday marked the end of our school’s conference “GGC”. We had a blast showing of the game and seeing people enjoy it! Here are some pictures from the showfloor.

cof

sdr

cof

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We are so grateful for everyone playing our game even after the word spread of the game where “you can have diarrhea and be in love at the same time”. It actually seems like people had a good time and every team of friends that played had their own tactics (or none) and played differently. We managed to get three prizes though one got us right in the heart, “student choice award”, which means that many people voted for us when there were so many amazing games! So thank you to everyone who visited us, played with us and had a laugh with us. We also thank for the great feedback as we will use it to keep on developing the game to become even better.

Now we will try to find an office and get this thing done! meanwhile we will discuss what to do with the demo as it might be released before the whole game is ready.

We have been farming so much that we forgot to update our blog for you! The whole team is united again and getting ready for Gotland Game Conference. Today the judges will be playing our games and both tomorrow and Tuesday all of you will get access to the booth crawl if you are here in Visby!

We will document during the conference so that you won’t miss out on all the fun. Also, our next big announcement is that we plan to release on Itch.io as soon as we get our final build for GGC (Gotland Game Conference) together.

What we have done so far is to implement all the things we thought would be most important to show off the core game play during the conference since people won’t be able to stand around and play for a long time. You can play from 2-4 players and you have certain goals you need to reach each day. We also fixed a tutorial which basically is playing a normal day cycle but without the pressure to raise money and grow a certain amount of crops. We also incorporated our “event” to make the days feel different from one another. We are doing the final bug testing and hope for the best.

Papa Anders in our team just had a presentation in front of the judges as well. It was very relaxed and we felt like it went pretty good.

New week and we have new objectives! We had a meeting and decided on how to plan our process. We also had some new ideas as how to make the game even more fun while having a static level. If you can’t go to trouble, trouble will just have to come to you. *muahah ..hrm* We designed some events that will occur every now and then. The events are obstacles that will make it harder for the players to navigate around the farm to do their tasks. This way one level will become very different and exciting! We don’t want to give away any details yet other than that we are excited.

But here, enjoy some really important tests we made. (no subjects were harmed during testing)

So we found out that they can’t ride the cows and they need some swim practice. Testing can be very informative! Have a great day, and you will hear from us soon!

Howdy folks! We don’t always farm you know. I thought I’d let you in on some short modelling tips this fine Tuesday.

Blender butter stern modelling

The low poly art style (low poly refers to the low resolution 3D, the more realistic, the more polygons – meaning higher resolution) can be tricky too. You still have to make sure everything is consistent and not looking more or less realistic or stylized, depending on what you are going for. In our game we are obviously going for a very stylized style where you can see all the hard edges and no smoothing on objects. another thing to have in mind is the size. I usually bring in another object, preferably one of the characters that is going to interact with the object into the scene. That way I can make sure I don’t model the object to big and that animations will work later on in the process. Blender is a great and free tool if you want to try out modelling. You can download it for HERE. We also create the animations in blender so we don’t have to switch programs to do that.

A great thing you can do if you are more than one artist or just want to make sure you get some strict guidelines is to create an art guide. The art guide is basically a guide that explains exactly how to create your art, step by step. Think of it as a guide that allows a complete stranger (with your graphical knowledge) to recreate something in your art style. It helps everyone to get a unanimous vision as well.